Don’t expect to get that e-mail query about the color choice of a particular brand of spring shoe answered in a hurry. A new study has found that more than half, 53%, of retail companies respond to e-mail within six hours, with most businesses in other industries failing to meet consumer expectations.
Meanwhile, with more than half of consumers expecting an answer within six hours, only 38% of companies meet this criteria and 33% are taking three days or longer to respond or are not doing so at all, according to a recent survey conducted by Jupiter Media Metrix, New York.
And the service is getting worse. In its last quarterly survey 19% of companies did not respond to inquiries, compared to 24% in this more recent survey.
"The increase in sites that are not responding to customer inquiries via e-mail is a signal that many companies still have not mastered e-mail customer service management," David Daniels a Jupiter analyst said in a statement. "Inefficient e-mail handling is causing customer service representatives to spend more time assisting customers via e-mail than they could by phone – in effect, making phone service more cost effective for companies than e-mail."
Jupiter suggests improving customer service response times with e-mail automation, technology that can accurately answer inquiries without intervention from customer service representatives.
Other findings include:
*Travel companies (12%) and corporate brand Web sites (0%) are the least effective at resolving customer inquiries within six hours. Fnancial services companies (46%) rank second behind retailers.
*Customer e-mail response expectations have been increasing over the last two years, from 24 hours to 12 to six.
*Although more than half of all inquiries are responded to within 24 hours, one-quarter receive no response at all.
E-mail auto-response is not widely used and is rarely effective, Jupiter said. Only one-quarter of companies use the technology and less than 2% successfully resolved customer inquiries. Retailers, for example can expect such systems to accurately answer 50% of their basic e-mail service complaints, such as order status, without any customer service representative intervention.
Jupiter analysts found that companies that receive 20,000 e-mail messages per month can save 90,000 dollars a year, while companies that receive 70,000 messages per month can save over 400,000 dollars.
